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Rackspace launches OpenCenter

Rackspace® Hosting has announced major new features in its free and open source Rackspace Private Cloud Software, powered by OpenStack and supported by its own Fanatical Support services. Key among the new functionality in this release is OpenCenter™, a single interface for deploying, configuring and operating clouds at scale in an enterprise datacentre.

Date: 6 Mar 2013

New features of Rackspace Private Cloud Software include:
• OpenCenter – Drawing from experience of operating The Rackspace Open Cloud, OpenCenter provides a centralised graphical user interface and API that simplifies and automates the operational activities associated with deploying, managing and maintaining Private Clouds.
• High Availability – OpenCenter provides API or point-and-click deployment and management of high availability environments for the OpenStack controller nodes, improving up-time and reducing business risk.
• Host Operating System Choice – Customers can now select from Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux or CentOS for the host operating system in Rackspace Private Cloud deployments.
• Rackspace Private Cloud Software is a combination of stable OpenStack® community 'trunk' code and proven Rackspace tools, packaging and configuration. To download the free and open source Rackspace Private Cloud Software, visit www.rackspace.com/cloud/private.

As a proven open cloud operator, enterprise CIO’s are trusting Rackspace more than ever to help them on the journey to become service providers in their own datacentres and accelerate their businesses with the efficiencies and value of cloud. Rackspace provides training, support or operations expertise on our Private Cloud powered by OpenStack to over 100 organisations, including 22 percent of the Fortune 100, since its launch in August 2012.

“Rackspace Private Cloud’s powerful new OpenCenter platform is a user interface and orchestration tool built to deploy, operate and scale on-premise private clouds. This paves the way for Rackspace to bring its continuous integration and deployment expertise from the public cloud arena into private enterprise datacentres,” said Jim Curry, SVP and GM of Rackspace Private Cloud. “We are taking our own solid technology practices forward into private open cloud backed by Fanatical Support.”

“Through the operation of The Rackspace Open Cloud, built on OpenStack, we have already seen over 1375 code releases pushed live to open cloud without customer disruption. This joins 465 million API requests for Cloud Servers and a total of over 8400 unit tests have been run before each code release, so it has been a busy and dynamic period,” Curry said.

"The Rackspace Private Cloud Software gives us more choices on how to best manage our cloud environment and bring DevOps capabilities to our customers. We can either leverage Rackspace to support our environment when needed or have them completely operate it for us – on or off premise," said Juan Caceres, services director at JC Global Resources. "With full access to Rackspace's team of Fanatical Support experts and the company's deep experience building and running the largest OpenStack public cloud, we have confidence that we can deliver an enterprise class cloud infrastructure to our customers that will perform optimally. This allows us to focus more attention on our core business."

We continue to introduce new open cloud capabilities that will enable customers to have a true ‘cloud anywhere’ experience through continuous integration and delivery, workload portability and network interoperability. With continuous delivery and integration customers can take advantage of continuously developed, tested, integrated and deployed innovations and improvements to Rackspace Private Cloud. Workload portability will allow customers to move and scale workloads between Rackspace public and private clouds, while network interoperability enables customers to create a true hybrid cloud on a single network.

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